As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, and as an increasing amount of data is being stored remotely, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to centralized or shared resource technologies, such as cloud computing and data warehousing. As the amount of traffic increases, there is a need to increase the capacity of these shared resources and also improve the efficiency of data transmission.
Existing network components rely on established protocols, such as the transmission control protocol (TCP) or user datagram protocol (UDP), to manage traffic across the network. In order to improve efficiency and expand the capabilities of the network, as well as for other such reasons, certain entities utilize proprietary, open source, or other specific protocols, such as the generic routing encapsulation (GRE) protocol. Oftentimes these protocols alter the header or other information about data packets to be routed across the network, which prevents conventional network components such as a network interface card (NIC) from recognizing and properly handling the packets. Further, components such as NICs provide functionality that improves performance, but proprietary protocols currently cannot take advantage of these improvements without expensive custom hardware.